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In a few weeks, 176 Chinese teachers will head to kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms across the country, from rural Kentucky towns to the tidy suburbs of Salt Lake City. Only two will remain in California, assigned to schools in Redding and Ojai.

Most had never before left China. They had come armed with hopes of succeeding in the classroom, with fears that American students would be difficult to manage and with impressions of U.S. culture based on a diet heavy in Hollywood films.

The guest teacher program, started in 2007 and partly funded by the federal language initiative, Startalk, is an effort by the College Board and the Chinese government's Chinese Language Council International, also known as Hanban. The agencies want to expand Chinese instruction in the United States. UCLA's Confucius Institute is in its second year of hosting the program.

In a few weeks, 176 Chinese teachers will head to kindergarten through 12th-grade classrooms across the country, from rural Kentucky towns to the tidy suburbs of Salt Lake City. Only two will remain in California, assigned to schools in Redding and Ojai.

Most had never before left China. They had come armed with hopes of succeeding in the classroom, with fears that American students would be difficult to manage and with impressions of U.S. culture based on a diet heavy in Hollywood films.

The guest teacher program, started in 2007 and partly funded by the federal language initiative, Startalk, is an effort by the College Board and the Chinese government's Chinese Language Council International, also known as Hanban. The agencies want to expand Chinese instruction in the United States. UCLA's Confucius Institute is in its second year of hosting the program.

I was half joking. Mandarin is supposed to be a popular second language, after Spanish. If you have kids that watch Nickelodeon, Ni Hao Kai Lan, a cartoon that teaches Chinese, Sort of like the Dora Explorer of Chinese.